Archive - April 2015

Scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana have made a breakthrough in the genetic engineering of yeasts that could bring about the end of the hangover.

The yeast found in wine is what is known as a polyploid gene. This means that the gene appears many times in the genome in perfect copies. Traditionally, these have been impossible to engineer because changing one version of the gene in the genome doesn’t stick – the genome would “correct” the gene that had been changed to match the rest. The scientists, however, have discovered a method for gene splicing that allows them to uniformly modify multiple versions of the gene, taking out the parts that cause hangovers, while keeping or improving other parts of the wine.